pinright

Version-accurate docs and a dependency check for coding agents. Your agent gets library versions from one of two places: its memory, where about 40% of the pins it wrote in our benchmark carried a known advisory, or a docs MCP server, which returns documentation and does not check the version against advisories. pinright gives it the docs for the exact version it installs and a verdict on every dependency it adds, before the install runs. MCP server, pre-install hook, CLI and GitHub Action, all local.

Install

Node 20.9 or newer. One line, then restart the agent:

npm i -g pinright && pinright init --user   # just you, every project; the hook starts in about 0.2 s
npx -y pinright init                        # your team: writes project files you commit

init wires the MCP server, the pre-install hook where the client has one, and a starter .pinright.json. 16 clients; six have a hook: Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code (GitHub Copilot), OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI and Windsurf. The Cursor and VS Code buttons above add the MCP server only. Every client, scopes and pinright doctor.

Without pinright, with pinright

Without. The agent runs npm install [email protected]. It installs. The lockfile now carries five advisories, two of them high, and nobody is told.

With. The hook answers before the command runs, and the agent reads this:

pinright blocked this dependency change:
- [email protected] (npm) has 5 known advisories (CVE-2021-23337, CVE-2026-4800, CVE-2020-28500, HIGH). Use 4.x release 4.18.1: npm install [email protected]
Change the version (or the name) and try again. check-package and get-docs from the pinright MCP server explain each case.

The agent retries with 4.18.1, on the same release line. When it asks first, check-package and get-docs give it the same verdict with the full advisory list, the version to pin, and the docs for that version. Real output of pinright hook claude, 2026-11-01.

Why pinright

Docs MCP servers return documentation for a library. They do not check the version the agent pins, and they do not see the install. To measure that kind of server we ran pinright's own server with its security layer off (PINRIGHT_ABLATION=docs-only): docs for the version asked, no verdict. It is not another product. Claude Code with Sonnet 5.5, Haiku 5.5 and Opus 5.5, 2 runs per cell, on the 1.0.0 code; each cell gives the range over the three models.

	No docs	Docs-only context server	pinright
Direct dependencies pinned with a known advisory	40% to 42%	0% to 2%	0%
Whole-tree alerts per project (npm audit, pip-audit)	29.8 to 31.9	0.3 to 3.5	0.3
Docs tasks that used the current API	9 to 14 of 16	15 or 16 of 16	16 of 16
Tokens per agent task	15k to 21k	56k to 94k	42k to 74k
Tokens per docs task	17k to 23k	94k to 135k	63k to 95k
Agent turns per agent task	4.0 to 4.3	9.3 to 11.1	5.9 to 7.5
MCP tool text read per agent task	none	25k to 45k characters	5k to 17k characters
Verdict on the version the agent pins	no	no	advisories, malware, lookalikes, versions that do not exist
Check when the install runs	no	no	pre-install hook in 6 clients
Whole-tree lockfile audit	no	no	check-manifest, SARIF, GitHub Action

Current docs alone removed most alerts; the verdict removed the rest. Per model, pinright used 21% to 26% fewer tokens than the docs-only server on the 12 agent tasks and 26% to 33% fewer on the 8 docs tasks. Every paired interval stays above zero; the lowest bound is 2%. Tokens count everything the model processed, cache reads included. No tools at all costs less than either.

Why fewer tokens. With docs only, the agent looked versions up through the docs: it called get-docs once per package, 5.2 to 5.7 times per agent task, before writing a file. 87% of those calls named no version, so they returned the docs of the latest release, and 75% asked for "version" or "latest" in the query. With pinright, every agent-task run opened with check-packages for the whole list, about 600 characters of verdicts and versions to pin, then called get-docs 0.7 to 1.7 times per task, with a version in 86 of 87 calls.

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